How To Spy On Your Competitors: 15 Competition Analysis Tools

Let’s talk about a subject that’s honestly a bit uncomfortable to some marketers – competition.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in–marketing is a game of competing for the attention of your audience. With so many marketing channels available today, that competition is oftentimes fierce. Think about it.

Competition for traffic, ad placement, followers and sales. The list goes on and on. And while the idea of conducting competitive analysis isn’t particularly “fun,” it’s absolutely necessary aspect of business intelligence.

Why competitor analysis tools are a must-have

The good news, though? There are a ton of competitor analysis tools out there to help you quickly and efficiently assess how you stack up against your top competitors.

And with the right tools on deck, you can spend less effort trying to dig dirt on your competitors and more time actually marketing.

Rather than spending too much time trying to spy on your competitors, why not let some smart tools do the legwork for you?

What tools can be used for competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis can be done in a lot of different ways and with a number of different tools. Any type of tool that lets you monitor your brand and others can be used to spy on the competition.

Competitor analysis tools for social media

1. Social Blade

A fun tool for checking out bigger brands is Social Blade. It assesses follower counts on the likes of Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among other services. Although often used to assess the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers.

2. Phlanx

This Instagram engagement calculator clues you in on how active any given account’s followers are. This is an awesome resource to analyze your competitor’s Instagram presence. Plus, it doubles as a way to figure out whether or not an influencer has a legitimate following.

Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate that followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc).

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.

You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.

AI-powered competitor analysis tools

4. Kompyte

Kompyte is a competitive intelligence tool that automatically pulls competitor updates into a single, easy-to-monitor dashboard. This includes updates from their website, review sites, content, social media, ads, job openings and more.

Crayon is an artificial intelligence tool that can help with both competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It helps users put together a dashboard of automatically-compiled and organized competitor updates so brands can always be in-the-know on what their competitors are doing.

Competitor analysis tools for SEO

6. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the most widely-used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set them apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.

7. Ahrefs

Another staple competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs’ site explorer, which allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. Additionally, you get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.

8. MozBar

This browser extension from Moz provides a surface-level view of how authoritative a site is in the eyes of Google. Based on Moz’s own metric of domain authority (DA), MozBar assigns sites a DA score based on its likelihood to rank in search engines (based on factors such as backlinks). The higher the DA score, the better.

Settled atop your browser, the MozBar is a useful tool to quickly determine a site’s search potential performance at a glance.

Competitor analysis tools for content

9. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool looks at a piece of content’s engagement on social sites as well as its total shares across the web.

10. Similarweb

Similarweb is an insanely comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The tools helps you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from.

11. Feedly

If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on a competitor’s content without checking up on their blog constantly, look no further than Feedly.

Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to see hot topics covered by your competitors, all on one page.

Competitor analysis tools for emails, ads and industries

12. Mailcharts

Email marketing is arguably one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis.

Recognizing this, Mailcharts aggregates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, Mailcharts pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.

Additionally, the tool compares your campaigns to their own massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices (think: timing, frequency, subject line length, etc).

13. Owletter

This tool automatically aggregates emails from competitors and organizes them into a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics spots changes in your competitors’ email frequency, and likewise picks up on trends to help you optimize when you should send your own emails.

14. iSpionage

If you’re interested in a competitor’s paid ads, iSpionage is definitely for you. This tool analyzes multiple aspects of PPC campaigns, including how many keywords a brand is targeting on AdWords.

15. Owler

Last but not least, this industry analysis tool uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again another tool reserved for bigger brands, you input brands to create your own custom dashboard of industry names to watch.

And that wraps up our list!

Analyze your actual competitors

There’s no use in trying to punch above your weight. A local coffee shop with 1,000 followers shouldn’t beat themselves up because they don’t have as many followers as Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts.

As noted earlier, context matters. Sure, take a look at what the big players in your industry are doing. But when assessing your competition, focus first on those who are the most similar in terms of size and target audience.

Focus on metrics first

When looking at competitors, it’s tempting to obsess over messaging.

However, it’s more prudent to take a data-driven approach to analysis first. Try to pick out as many metrics before trying to break down the “why” of their marketing.

For example, how often do your competitors post new content? What’s the ratio of promotional versus non-promotional posts? What are their top-performing keywords and hashtags?

The answers to these questions are arguably as important as understanding someone’s messaging.

Turn analysis into action

Finally, make sure the data you uncover translates into some sort of action.

Maybe you uncover a new set of keywords to target in your content based on your research. Perhaps you haven’t been pushing your content nearly hard enough based on how active your competitors are.

Either way, the end game of competitive analysis is to improve your own marketing strategy. The more information you glean from competitors, the better.

Competitive analysis is a crucial component of fine-tuning your marketing strategy. By using the right set of tools, you can run your analysis quickly and actually spend more time focusing on your own efforts.